Hi :) I'm Joan, welcome to my newsletter! I used to post on Substack but honestly I kind of hate the website so I'm switching to something simpler and with less baggage, in the hopes that it makes me actually post more.
If someone forwarded you this, or you stumbled upon it by accident, or you haven't actually kept up with what I've been doing in life, I'm currently a first year PhD student in the UK researching queer diasporic Singaporean literature. I also teach and do editorial work on the side for Poetry.sg!
Things you will hopefully receive in this newsletter (infrequently):
- What I've been reading/writing/etc. for school/work,
- What I've been reading/writing/etc. for my hobbies,
- Miscellaneous commentary,
- At least one thing depicting proof of life.
School/Work Round-Up
I've presented twice in March for school, which is really cool because it's like wow! Baby's first presentations as an academic. I presented earlier in the month at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, for their Singapore Society to give a basic overview of Singaporean literature.
More recently, I also Zoomed in to Proud Spaces in Singapore to present a paper called Queering Borders And Bodies In Amanda Lee Koe's Novels at No Uniforms: An Assembly For Queer Studies. Thanks to everyone who invited me and organised things! Really cool experiences :)
Other than this I've mostly been working on my dissertation chapter (the chunk of what I presented on at Proud Spaces was based on this). It's been helpful for me to present to be honest, because it's been forcing me to sit down and write regularly! I've found that recording myself voice notes of what I'm trying to say and then re-jigging the flow of my slides based on that has been really helpful.
Hobbies Round-Up
I've been playing a lot of Pokemon Pokopia. It's really good. On the day I bought it I played from 3pm to 3am and almost forgot to eat in the middle, except for when my friend Caroline (hi oomf) called me to talk about Homestuck. And then after that I went back to playing Pokopia. It's peak. You play as a Ditto in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where all the humans are gone. You build habitats for other Pokemon who get functionally released from the big PC in the sky when they have a space that's livable for them. It's really different from previous Pokemon games in a way that feels really fresh and exciting.
Other than this, I've started hosting a Singaporean movie club on Discord with my friends, because I've realised that I'm kind of bad at watching movies and want to get better at it for the sake of my attention span (and also for Letterboxd). And also because I do want to become literate in Singaporean film. Again something I'm kind of bad at. Recently we watched 15, directed by Royston Tan, which is a film about Singaporean teenage ah bengs/gangers. Apparently it was his directorial debut but it is REALLY good and I enjoyed it a lot. Many scenes that are very visceral, though, so I would recommend watching with caution (content warnings for, among other things, on-screen self-harm and swallowing drugs for drug trafficking). The full film is available on Youtube and there's a version with English subs, which is how I watched it.
Haven't been finishing any books recently. I got halfway through How To Take Smart Notes by Sonkë Ahrens, which is mostly pretty good for the kind of self-help book that Obsidian/PKM dudebros seem to shill a lot. I kind of fell off because it's become pretty repetitive but I'm hoping that I can get back to it tomorrow or at least DNF it properly. I think I can finish it, I'm just bored. I also started Pride and Prejudice, which I don't think I've read in full before despite doing a high school project on it (insert skull emoji here) but I'm dragging my feet about it a little bit. I've bought a bunch of physical books/zines in the past six months during various excursions (most recently to Scotland, but also before that during queer lit fests, and brought to the UK from SG, and so on) which I have yet to fully dig through! So I will be trying to do that soon. Eventually.
My TBR runs very long (see my Storygraph for more). I don't think I'm a slow reader but I'm starting to realise that books take me forever to read when I'm trying to take notes on them so I'm kind of wondering if I should give up on doing that, and focus on only noting things down if they really catch my attention. Because I don't come back to my notes a lot for fiction! Unless the book is very good or relevant. Frowning at this... I keep being like there's not enough time in my day to read and this is just not true, I've just also been feeling too overstimulated recently to be good at reading books. Partially because of the Pokopia but also because of the conference presentation and all. I think I might need to let my brain try to calm down a little bit before I get back into reading. But I do have a wide assortment of things that I'm pretty excited to read!
I've also been writing more than usual, which is nice. It's all been fanfiction but I've been doing a writing event, and so I've been trying to challenge myself to do things that are interesting (which is a very broad term here but are at least, like, interesting to me!). Not linking any of that here (god bless) but I've written just over 14k this month, around 6-7k of which was in a Twine game, so I feel like I've mostly succeeded in my goals. There's still some days left, so hopefully I do actually write more by the end of the month. I had a list of WIPs to run down and I DID get most of them done. :)
Miscellaneous Commentary
The sun is out here, and it's making me a LOT better about being depressed than I was even compared to a month ago. It rained for over two months straight in the UK and I was starting to feel very uh, Noah's Ark, about the whole affair. But Brighton is, broadly speaking, as warm as the UK gets, so I get to go out in minimal layers now and it's pretty nice.
Also, I fell off journaling this week on account of the Pokopia mainly, but I got back into it today! It was nice, I wrote like 4 pages I think? At some point I will be infodumping extensively about how I organise/write in my books, but this post is already pretty long.
Proof Of Life
I got some new drink glasses and a carafe at the grocery store. They have bees on them. :) I like them! I think I'm going to use them to make more iced strawberry matcha lattes, because the current cup I've been using has been kind of small. Love my beloved bear cup though he's cute.
I also got risers for my Smiskis (and other display items, like the York Ghost Merchants ghosties) because I'm tired of not being able to see the guys at the back while they're sitting on my shelf LOL.
That's all for this dispatch :) See you next time!